This is the morning after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the August 9, 2014 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. I watched St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s announcement, said a prayer for Brown’s family, the people of Ferguson and the protestors who filled the streets outside the police station there, as well as in cities around the country. I said a prayer for my friends in St. Louis County, some in the media, some who are educators, some in government. I said a prayer for all of the black men I know, and for all of us who love them. And then I went to bed, because I knew that the morning would come, and there would still be serious work to do.

The details of what is happening in Ferguson matter, but the response must take into account the reality that, as New Yorker writer and University of Connecticut history professor Jelani Cobb has written, “Ferguson is America.” full of fears and frustrations that, often misdirected and misplaced, circumscribe the lives of black men daily. Cobb writes:

I was once a linebacker-sized eighteen-year-old, too. What I knew then, what black people have been required to know, is that there are few things more dangerous than the perception that one is a danger. I’m embarrassed to recall that my adolescent love of words doubled as a strategy to assuage those fears; it was both a pitiable desire for acceptance and a practical necessity for survival. I know, to this day, the element of inadvertent intimidation that colors the most innocuous interactions, particularly with white people. There are protocols for this. I sometimes let slip that I’m a professor or that I’m scarcely even familiar with the rules of football, minor biographical facts that stand in for a broader, unspoken statement of reassurance: there is no danger here. And the result is civil small talk and feeble smiles and a sense of having compromised. Other times, in an elevator or crossing a darkened parking lot, when I am six feet away but the world remains between us, I remain silent and simply let whatever miasma of stereotype or fear might be there fill the void.

I was 24 years old and in graduate school. I had decided to surprise my parents by popping in for a weekend, unannounced. It must have been autumn, because it was dark when I arrived, and it was still early evening. I came in the front door and found out they weren’t home. I put my bags upstairs, turned on the kitchen light, and I saw their car pulling into the back driveway. I went downstairs to open the back door for them, reaching up with my right hand to flip a light switch, and pulling the door back with my left.. On the back lawn, I made out the figure of a young white police officer pointing his gun at me. I think he said something like, “Hands up! Police!” but I no longer remember. From the right, I heard my father’s voice, and I saw him rounding the back of the car with his arms outstretched.

“Don’t shoot! That’s my daughter!”

The officer paused. I think he turned his head to look at my father and back to me. I stood still. My father stood still, where the officer could see him. He holstered his gun. He confirmed that everything was okay and he left. The crisis had passed. Later, we learned that a neighbor had seen the light go on in the kitchen and panicked, knowing that my parents’ car was not in the driveway and I was away at school. There had been some robberies in the neighborhood. It was a simple misunderstanding, easily rectified.

Fortunately, the officer did not feel threatened. Fortunately, he was able to hear my father. Fortunately, he was not like the panicky rookie cop in Brooklyn who recently shot an unarmed man to death in a stairwell.

Of course, I was reminded of the Richard Pryor joke about one of his own encounters with the police, where he loudly intoned, “I am reaching into my wallet, to get my driver’s license,” because, he said, “I don’t to be no (bleeping) accident!” Years later, I told my Race, Gender and News students about the encounter as we discussed how one should cover the acquittal of four police officers in the shooting death of unarmed 22-year-old Amadou Diallo in the doorway of his apartment building. He was, it turned out, reaching for his identification when the heavily-armed police officers fired on him.

What if I had been male?

What if something had been in my hand?

What if my father had not shown up?

My experience was not that of Mike Brown, Amadou Diallo, or John Crawford, the 22-year-old who was shot to death (graphic video warning) in an Ohio Walmart while talking on the phone and holding a toy gun in an open-carry state. It was, however, frightening enough that I cried writing this, 33 years later. My encounter happened before the height of the crack epidemic, mass incarceration and mass marketing of the hypermasculinity and lunatic madness of corporate-sponsored gangster rap. (See Byron Hurt’s “HipHop Beyond Beats and Rhymes.”)

As the fires are doused in Ferguson, there is pain and anger in the streets. People who put their faith in peaceful protest feel betrayed. Civil libertarians worry about the militarization of police. Certainly these are important issues. TheUS Justice department may impose reforms on the Ferguson Police Department in light of this and other charges of the use of racial profiling and excessive force over a period of years.

Indeed, as former police commissioner Anthony Bouza has argued, police-community tensions reflect a larger societal failure to confront disparities of poverty and race.

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has set up a commission to examine the root causes of and potential remedies for the region’s racial and economic divides. When Pres. Lyndon Johnson appointed a similar commission nearly 50 years ago, one of the common understandings to emerge was the need for everyone to feel as if they had a stake in the system. Author Michelle Alexander put it this way:

[T]rue justice will come only when our criminal injustice system is radically transformed: when we no longer have militarized police forces, wars on our communities, a school-to-prison pipeline, and police departments that shoot first and ask questions later. True justice will be rendered not when when a single “guilty” verdict is rendered in one man’s case, but when the system as a whole has been found guilty and we, as a nation, have committed ourselves to repairing, as best we can, the immeasurable harm that has been done.

I’ve asked friends who know the Ferguson area what young people there have to look forward to. They struggle for an answer. Jobs are scarce. Normandy, Missouri, the school system where Michael Brown earned his diploma is so poor, it lost its accreditation in 2013. In Education Week this past September, Normandy teacher Inga Schaenen argued,

Nearly every student I teach has lived through encounters with the police that nobody should ever have to experience. (I know this from their journal entries written the first week of school.) And we know from research conducted by Gloria Ladson-Billings,Alfred Tatum, and many others regarding African-American students that best practices call for teachers to actively, critically, and morally engage students’ real lives and communities. When we do so, our students will achieve academically. Pedagogically speaking, designing community-responsive, standards-based activities and lessons is a moral imperative in Normandy.

One friend to whom I posed this question directed me to St. Louis Community College’s Bridge to STEM program, which provides intensive tutoring and mentoring to prepare students with a diploma or G.E.D. for study in the life sciences. The school also offers accelerated workforce training in a range of technical fields, in partnership with local industry. Certainly, this is part of the puzzle.

But it leaves unanswered the question that Du Bois posed more than a century ago: “Training for life teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of black men and white? Especially since, it must be acknowledged, most poor Americans are not black, and pessimism about future economic opportunities is pervasive in the US and other advanced economies.

Here, again, the work begins anew. I am a journalist and educator, not a civil rights attorney or policy maker. There is a lot to be said about how the press has covered all of this, and I will leave that to others. I want to help people find a reason for hope.

My own effort, although it may seem unrelated, is to think about how we can use media to support those who people together across lines of difference to work on common community problems. That’s part of my personal stake in projects such as SOAP, an interdisciplinary collaboration to provide New Jersey residents with accessible, comprehensive and current information about polluted properties in their neighborhoods. (If you follow the link, you won’t see much now, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes, that we hope to make public in coming months.) Our hope is that SOAP will help agencies such as Habitat for Humanity in siting affordable housing. We also hope it will be useful to Isles, a Trenton non-profit working to promote environmental and economic sustainability, in finding safe property for the dozens of community gardens its volunteers build to combat hunger. Community gardens not only help combat hunger – they may make communities safer.

This is one of several projects, and it is only a beginning. Ultimately, I think the media’s part of the solution will also have to include a shift toward what I’m calling culturally responsive journalism – a journalism that covers community responses to problems in ways that emphasize that humanity and enlarge the capacity of the community to take action to solve problems. We saw elements of that approach in the coverage of Ferguson – Michel Martin’s #Beyond Ferguson forum, for example. I still believe alternate reality games can be useful in this area. But that is another post.

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Also of interest: Sheila Seuss Kennedy calls for a new GI Bill that includes a one year program of civic service and participation.

In all of the research, debate and analysis surrounding affirmative action, I have become convinced that we are missing a golden opportunity to be more innovative in our thinking about ways of achieving educational equality. I believe that if we analyze some of the voluminous data we have using emerging tools in networking science, interactive multimedia and social psychology, we can create effective new models for teaching, mentoring and advising students and young professionals from non-traditional backgrounds.

I write this essay to suggest how these tools might be created, and how they might be applied in ways that are less contentious than our current arguments about fairness and distributive justice. In advancing this proposal, I do not mean to suggest that such arguments are not important or necessary – because they are. I do suggest however, that if we are sincere about wanting to see each child achieve his or her full potential, science and history may be able to offer us a way we are not currently considering. And conceptually, at least, it isn’t that complicated.

A final disclaimer before I disclose my idea: I am neither a scientist nor a trained historian. I come to this conversation as an Affirmative Action baby with a quarter century of professional experience as a writer and teacher in the fields of public relations, magazine writing and interactive multimedia. This idea emerged from reflecting on that polyglot experience, and on those of my forbears, as I read Columbia University sociology professor Duncan Watts’ book, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Norton, 2003).

Watts’ book describes an emerging body of theory of how disparate phenomena are affected by their internal and external connections – whether the phenomenon under study is computer viruses, power outages, or political activism. It turns out that I am one of the thousands of e-mail users who have participated in Watts’ internet-based Small World project, which tries to ascertain whether there really are only six degrees of separation between two randomly selected individuals. In the Six Degrees project, volunteers are given the name of a “target” individual and told to get as close to that person as they can by sending an e-mail to someone they know. About two years ago, I got an e-mail from a former student asking me to help establish a connection to a person who worked at Bloomberg LP. I didn’t know the target person, but I know lots of people at Bloomberg, so I picked one of them and passed the e-mail along. Simple idea.

As Watts discloses in his book, the data from this simple experiment gives rise to some powerful and sophisticated mathematical models that, like chaos theory, can be applied quite broadly. He suggests that these models can eventually be used to predict the outcome of elections, or suggest effective job-hunting strategies or to understand and defuse terrorists’ cells. It occurs to me that we can also use these modeling techniques to understand how structures of educational opportunity are created and most effectively deployed.

The first case study that came to mind from which hypothetical models could be developed and tested was the education of pioneering African American intellectual William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963). Du Bois grew up in a predominantly white, politically liberal New England town, and the town’s leading citizens funded his undergraduate education at Fisk. His academic performance at Fisk earned him the attention of the people who became his benefactors at Harvard, and that placed him in the position to learn about the fellowship that would ultimately make it possible to attend the University of Berlin. It seems to me that we ought to be able to model Du Bois’ educational trajectory as a series of small network problems. The first step would be to look at the likelihood that a poor colored boy would get a scholarship to Fisk. The second would be the leap from Fisk to Harvard, then Harvard to Berlin.

Modeling these steps seems to me to be relatively simple because the numbers of people involved are small If all of this works, it might provide a way of mapping an individual’s structures of opportunity, and of conceiving strategies for maximizing the optimal use of such small networks. I suspect that this would be a rather difficult thing to model. This is the second part of what I was thinking about. The networks that supported Du Bois were, in some cases generated, you might say, activated, by stories. By this I mean that the town fathers of Great Barrington had certain beliefs about themselves, a common story that formed part of the basis of their working relationship. Descended from one of great Barrington’s old black families, Du Bois presented himself in a way that fit their story about themselves as former abolitionists. The storytelling part of the network building becomes particularly

important when Du Bois tries to get his fellowship to go to Berlin. Rutherford B. Hayes, by then a former President, headed a foundation that was supposed to support black students who were pursuing advanced degrees. He gave a speech saying that they hadn’t found anyone to give the money to. Du Bois heard about what Hayes was saying, and wrote Hayes a letter saying, essentially: Hey, I’m here, and so are several other colored Harvard men, why haven’t we been given a chance to apply? Ultimately, because Du Bois was supported by such people as William James, he got to apply, and he got the fellowship. Du Bois’ network enabled him to make Hayes act in a way that’s consistent with his story.

It seems to me that Du Bois’ experience is similar to what happens to students who are successful beneficiaries of affirmative action. Much of the value of my Princeton experience is related to the small networks I have been able to join. I would submit that our access to those networks has been mediated by the stories that govern their internal behavior, the stories told about us as potential new entrants and, to a lesser extent, the stories we tell about ourselves. These stories don’t exist by themselves, of course — they are cultural products — but I am focused on their function.

One of the ways in which stories may affect the functioning of networks of educational opportunity is in countering a phenomenon that Stanford University social psychologist Claude Steele calls “stereotype threat.” According to Steele, stereotype threat occurs when an individual feels as if he or she is being evaluated according to a stereotype. Although Steele asserts that anyone can be affected by stereotype threat, he has studied the phenomenon’s effects on middle-class African American college students and women students in scientific and technical fields. Steele’s research suggests that stereotype threat accounts for academic underperformance in well-prepared students with high self-esteem.

Let me illustrate how I think the right combination of stories and networks can create opportunities while subverting stereotype threat. About 20 years ago, I had the privilege of profiling a pioneering black engineer, Dr. Walter Lincoln Hawkins for Black Collegian magazine. “Linc” Hawkins was the first black scientist at Bell Labs. Even though he came of age during the Great Depression and in an era of virulent racism, Linc came

from segregated Washington DC to graduate first, from the city’s fabled Dunbar High School, followed by an undergraduate degree from Renssalear Polytechnical Institute and a doctorate from Mc Gill University. At Bell Labs, he earned 14 patents, including one for the polymer that allows us to put telephone cables underground and at the bottom of the sea. He spent his retirement years working to create programs that help women and students of color become successful scientists and engineers.

Along the way, Linc admitted that he had encountered plenty of racism – lots of stereotype threat. He didn’t talk much about those kinds of experiences, but a few examples emerged from conversations with him and others. For example, when his mother trekked from Washington, D.C. to Canada to hear Linc defend his dissertation, she was initially barred from the meeting room because of her race. Other Bell Labs old-timers told me that Linc spent his first decade there without any lab assistants, because there were no black assistants available, his managers couldn’t envision him giving orders to a white male, and they thought that it would be unseemly for him to have a white woman working under him. Ultimately, he did get a white female assistant, but for many years, he had to wash his own test tubes and tend to his own supplies.

When I asked him about the key to his success, he credited the foundation that his high school had given him – not just academically, but psychologically and practically. First, it should be understood that in its heyday, Dunbar was an exceptional place. The segregated, selective public high school was staffed by some of the best-educated black people on the planet – including such Harlem Renaissance cognoscenti as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Grimke and Jessie Fauset. They were graduates of such schools as Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, but Dunbar was one of the few teaching jobs available to them. However, the faculty’s high-toned backgrounds gave them connections that they used to steer students into and through the kinds of schools they, themselves, had attended.

Attending Dunbar at the height of the New Negro movement, Hawkins recalled being taught African history and African American literature, in addition to the traditional elite high school curriculum of that day. He particularly remembered a physics teacher he called Prof. Weatherless, who drove a new Reo car every year as a royalty for his participation in the invention of the starter. He said that he knew he could succeed at RPI, Mc Gill and Bell Labs because he knew his heritage, and he had living examples in front of him.

The lives such people as Du Bois and Hawkins are sufficiently well documented that one ought to be able to graph the ways in which these networks and stories worked for them. However, I have no idea how to go about it.

I have discussed elements of this idea with mathematicians and social scientists who tell me that it’s worth exploring, although there isn’t a neat existing structure through which to do it. So, I am sharing my idea with the world with the hope of finding the people who can take it as far as it deserves to go.

What I believe

The real mission of 21st-century journalism is to help us learn to look and listen so we don't kill each other and the planet. I believe that media tools and processes can help individuals build community, solve problems and transmit constructive values. To that end, I work with computer science educators to broaden participation in computing, so that everyone has access to the 21st century marketplace of ideas.